$37.00 NZD

'She is silent now because she is ten and she learns five new words a day and puts them in a sentence, but she has not yet reached the words for this...' Ten years old and irrepressibly curious, Ellie lives with her fisherman father, Peter, on the wild North Yorkshire coast. It's the 1980s and her mothe
r's breakdown is discussed only in whispers, with the promise 'better by Christmas' and no further explanation. Steering by the light of her dad's sea-myths, her mum's memories of home across the water, and a fierce spirit all her own, Ellie begins to learn - in these sudden, strange circumstances - who she is and what she can become. By the time the first snowdrops show, her innocence has been shed, but at great cost. This vivacious and deeply moving novel portrays adult breakdown through the eyes of a brightly imaginative child, sensitively explores questions of responsibility and care, and, above all, celebrates the power of stories to shape, nourish and even save us....Show more

$37.00 NZD

A funny, fantastically entertaining debut novel, in the spirit of Wodehouse and Monty Python, about a famous poet who inadvertently sells his wife to the devil--then recruits a band of adventurers to rescue her. When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they're
broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him. Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil -- the polite "Gentleman" of the title -- who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party's over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord. Newly in love with Vivien, Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell that includes Simmons, the butler; Tompkins, the bookseller; Ashley Lancaster, swashbuckling Buddhist; Will Kensington, inventor of a flying machi≠ and Savage's spirited kid sister, Lizzie, freshly booted from boarding school for a "dalliance." Throughout, his cousin's quibbling footnotes to the text push the story into comedy nirvana. Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, anarchist-fearing bobbies, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history, and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny, The Gentleman is a giddy farce that recalls the masterful confections of P.G. Wodehouse and Herg�'s beautifully detailed Tintin adventures. From the Hardcover edition....Show more

$35.00 NZD

Casey Han's years at Princeton have given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, wealthy friends, a popular white boyfriend, and a magna cum laude degree in economics. But no job, and a number of bad habits...The elder daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, Casey inhabits a New York a w
orld away from that of her parents. As Casey navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values, ideals and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society, its many layers, shades and divides...'Take Zadie Smith's White Teeth, add the glamour of The Devil Wears Prada, and throw in a social commentary on modern identity crises' Eve....Show more

$38.00 NZD

A darkly hilarious portrait of one dysfunctional American family and its scheming matriarch Everyone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hard-working, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant -- endlessly comparing her many
living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a vice-like hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood. Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism. This is an engrossing, hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of a modern family -- the bickering, the conspiracies, and the drive to overcome the painful ties that bind....Show more

$37.00 NZD

An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each
in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue. Meanwhile, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe under troubling conditions. Wanting to help, but also looking for a lost sense of home, our grown-up transplant finds herself quickly entranced by a world that is at once everything she has missed and nothing that she has ever known. Will her immersion in the lives of these new refugees allow her the grace to save her father? Refuge charts the deeply moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration. Beautifully written, full of insight, charm, and humor, the novel subtly exposes the parts of ourselves that get left behind in the wake of diaspora and ultimately asks: Must home always be a physical place, or can we find it in another person?...Show more

$38.00 NZD

By Norway's bestselling novelist and the author of NORWEGIAN WOOD, a family story of epic scale. Edvard grows up on a remote mountain farmstead in Norway with his taciturn grandfather, Sverre. The death of his parents, when he was three years old, has always been shrouded in mystery - he has never been
told how or where it took place and has only a distant memory of his mother. But he knows that the fate of his grandfather's brother, Einar, is somehow bound up with this mystery. One day a coffin is delivered for his grandfather long before his death - a meticulous, beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Perhaps Einar is not dead after all. Edvard's desperate quest to unlock the family's tragic secrets takes him on a long journey - from Norway to the Shetlands, and to the battlefields of France - to the discovery of a very unusual inheritance. The Sixteen Trees of the Somme is about the love of wood and finding your own self, a beautifully intricate and moving tale that spans an entire century. Translated from the Norwegian by Paul Russell Garrett...Show more

$40.00 NZD

Walter Urban and Friedich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walt
er is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances. In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy....Show more

$33.00 NZD

Wellington, 1885. Tally Ho doesn't need to go to school because she is going to be a fisherman or a cart driver or a butcher boy like Harry Crawford. Wellington is her town and she makes up the rules. Papa takes her fishing, Nonno teaches her how to jump fences on his horse Geronimo - life gallops on th
e way it should, until a brother, baby William is born. Go and play with your sisters, Papa says, but wearing dresses and sipping tea is not the life for Tally Ho. Taking her hero Harry Crawford's advice, she runs away. Sydney, 1917. A burned woman is discovered on the banks of the Lane Cove River. Was she a mad woman? A drunk who'd accidentally set herself on fire? Nobody knows, until- three years later-a tailor's apprentice tells police that his mother went missing that very same weekend, and his stepfather, Harry Crawford, is not who he seems to be. Who, then, is he? Sydney, 1938. After being hit by a car on Oxford Street, sixty-three-year-old Jean Ford lies in a coma in Sydney Hospital. Doctors talk across her body, nurses jab her in the arm with morphine, detectives arrive to take her fingerprints. Memories come back to her - of a life as a man, of life as a female prisoner - but they are always shifting and she can no longer tell the difference between what she did, what she said she did, and what other people believed she did. Based on the true story of Eugenia Falleni (alias Harry Crawford, alias Jean Ford), Half-Wild is a brilliant debut novel of true originality and power....Show more

$37.00 NZD

Frank has a gift for finding his customers the music they need to hear. When he meets Ilsa Brauchmann, a mysterious and beautiful woman with no ear for music, and engaged to another man, he falls in love. She is way above him, she will never be his, but he will take her on a journey through music.
Twel
ve years later Ilsa returns to find Frank. The shop has gone; no one knows where he is; perhaps he's dead. All that remains is a series of clues, each one related to music. Ilsa resolves to follow them and bring Frank back to life with music, just as he once did for her....Show more

$35.00 NZD

A shocking mass murder occurs at a wedding in a small Dales church and a huge manhunt follows. Eventually, the shooter is run to ground and things take their inevitable course. But Banks is plagued with doubts as to exactly what happened outside the church that day, and why. Struggling with the death of
his first serious girlfriend and the return of profiler Jenny Fuller into his life, Banks feels the need to dig deeper into the murders, and as he does so, he uncovers forensic and psychological puzzles that lead him to the past secrets that might just provide the answers he is looking for. When the surprising truth becomes clear, it is almost too late....Show more

$45.00 NZD

"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden." Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alo
ne. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic....Show more

$38.00 NZD

One may as well begin, 'Once Upon a Time ...' We thought to tell a story with such momentum; a truck careering down a hillside, thunder in a rocky riverbed, a skeleton tumbling to the ground. There must be at least one brave and resilient character at its centre, Tilly Coolman (one of us), and the story
will speak of magic in an empirical age; of how our dead will return, transformed, to support us again and from within. Except this is no fairy tale....Show more